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Tuesday, August 1, 2017

Exchange upgrades and forgotten servers

Hello Everyone! Got a guest post from a colleague of mine today. Erick Purkins is a Microsoft consultant out of the Houston Texas area and he did a write up of a recent issue he saw. Enjoy.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I just wanted to share an experience and issue with everyone
this morning.

I am currently working with a customer to upgrade their
Exchange 2010 infrastructure to Exchange 2016. During our discussions, we
talked about correct service pack levels and OS’s required, etc. One thing I
didn’t think to talk about was “FAILED EXCHANGE SERVERS”. Just curious if
anyone brings this up?

This is important because during the installation of their
first 2016 server I received a rather odd error.

It was the
“Update-RmsSharedIdentity -ServerName $RoIeNetBIOSName was run:
"Microsoft.ExchangeData.DataVaIidationException: Database is mandatory on
UserMaiIbox.” That led me to the issue.

Apparently at one time or another
they had an Exchange server go belly up. Instead of fixing the issue they
turned it off and forgot about it, eventually having someone go in and remove
the server through ADSI.

Now normally this wouldn’t have
been much cause for alarm, but after reviewing the error message and a little
google-fu I realized they had no arbitration mailboxes and this was what the
error referred to.

So How did I fix this issue?

First, I reviewed how to recreate Arbitration mailboxes.
Something I have done before but not in a while.

Since I had previously run the Exchange 2016 setup it had
ran /prepareAD and updated the schema. So I could not run the Exchange 2010 SP3
with /PrepareAD to recreate the mailboxes.

Where to next? I guess I’ll have to use the Exchange
2016 Media.

I hope you’ll never have to do this but with Setup.exe there
is a /mode switch which you can use to remove a failed Exchange install. This
is the only way, you cannot remove the install through add/remove programs. The
command looks like this “Setup.exe /mode:uninstall
/iacceptexchangeserverlicenseterms”

After successfully removing the Exchange installation I
removed the AD objects associated with Arbitration mailboxes and re-run
Setup.exe /prepareAD. All the correct mailboxes were recreated in the Default
Users container as they are supposed to.

Now it’s time to enable those mailboxes…

After recreating the mailboxes with the Exchange 2016 Media
I followed what I would normally do and re-enable them through the shell. Okay
new error, WTH? You mean to tell me I can only do this through the Exchange
2016 Shell, but I haven’t gotten a server even installed yet. Now we have a
Chicken or the egg situation.

Do we try and install Exchange 2016 again? You Feeling
Lucky?

That was the only thing I could think of to do and the
internet was no help with that question. So I ran setup again and prayed to the
Microsoft gods while crossing everything and holding every lucky charm I could
find.

Must have been the lucky rabbits foot, because this time
around we were successful at installing Exchange 2016.

After rebooting the server all arbitration mailboxes appear
on the new Exchange server.

Moral of the story

Talk to your customers about failed or improperly
decommissioned servers. Double check your arbitration mailboxes prior to any
upgrade. It may just save you a few hours of Google-fu. Also, always keep a
lucky rabbits foot close at hand.